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Native American Activist Discusses Ban in Tucson

ICTMN Staff

1/29/12

Bill Means, American Indian Movement co-founder and a member of the board of the International Indian Treaty Council, recently spoke with Dennis Bernstein about the Ethnic Studies and Native American book ban at the Tucson Unified School District.

Means talks about how the ban, which includes some Native American authors, has affected Native American communities by taking role models away from Native youth. He says: "it becomes a racist policy because Indian people feel we are relegated to a lower class of people. We have no heroes, we have none of our own people we can look up to and say 'This is what they said, this is what their book has documented.' So it’s very detrimental to the mental well-being, the educational well-being, the character-building of Indigenous youth and children. And it’s one of the atrocities of the modern day, that is being committed in the educational systems of Arizona."

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Tribes should join hands in money and strength to initiate, and maintain, schools directed at solid and sound education for our native youth. This nation has proved time and time again that its educational systems are not only disfunctional and failures, for even its own youth, but America's opportunities to show any positive or prosperous evolution towards its youngs futures are done. Only grass roots movements, and an occasional hero might surface at their own costs and eviction from the educational community only proves that American youth, especially minorities and females, are held back in terms of knowledge and information that keep America lagging as a solid competitor in the world arena of invention and brilliance. Instead, America's educational institutions equal that of either third world ghettos or puritanical institutions bent on profit for the exclusive elites young. Internationally, youth from other nations show better grasp and knowledge of American history than America's own, what does this tell us? Furthermore, it is insulting and a confirmed waste of financing the genocide, as well as assimulation to "kill the Indian in order to save the man" as non-native Americans today are bloated with the popularity and popular cultural trend of being "stupid", just look at the nations election of President George W. Bush, Donald Trump and Paris Hilton, where ignorance is not only acceptable, but, ordained by America's Christian leadership. After being forced at gunpoint to be "white" and "civilized", the supposedly most powerful office in the greatest nation on earth honors a man that could speak in full sentences while they demonize our first black president for not using the word "God" enough in his speeches? We need our own schools my indigenous brothers and sisters instead of supporting hostile and racist educational institutions.

CORRECTION: "After being forced at gunpoint to be “white” and “civilized”, the supposedly most powerful office in the greatest nation on earth honors a man that could NOT speak in full sentences while they demonize our first black president for not using the word “God” enough in his speeches?